


Five Times Dallon Tried to Understand and the One Time Brendon Helped Him

by ledtherevolution



Category: Panic! at the Disco
Genre: M/M, Past Ryan Ross/Brendon Urie, Synesthesia, weird au type thing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-05
Updated: 2016-10-05
Packaged: 2018-08-19 15:15:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,988
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8213800
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ledtherevolution/pseuds/ledtherevolution
Summary: Brendon has synesthesia, Dallon tries to understand the way he sees the world. Another one of those 5 +1 types.





	

**Author's Note:**

> As always, thanks to mcusekat on tumblr for beta-ing for me

1.

Dallon stares into their bedroom, mouth hanging open. He’s holding a mug of coffee, he hasn’t even changed for work yet. Their room is a _mess_ and that never happens. After being with Brendon for almost three years, he knows he's a tidy person; Dallon, while messy at times respects the way Brendon wants the house to feel. So not being able to see the carpet is alarming.

“Brendon?” He asks slowly, the rustling pauses for a moment, then continues. “What are you doing?”

“I’m-” he can hear a frustrated sigh. “-looking for something.”

“Yeah I can tell.” He steps carefully over piles of God knows what to locate his partner. “Need help?”

“Yeah, I guess so.” Brendon straightens up from the floor and sets his hands on his hips. “It’s a CD, I can’t remember the name of it but it’s good,” he glances anxiously around the atrocity that their room has become. “Sounds-” he squints a little. “-purple.”

Dallon almost drops his mug.

“Purple? Songs don’t have colors,” he says.

“They don’t?” Brendon looks distraught, which never makes Dallon feel good.

“Well, maybe...I don’t know. I don’t see any colors.” He bends down and fishes out a case with Pink Floyd’s _Dark Side of the Moon._ “This it?”

Brendon takes the CD from him, but he doesn’t look any more relaxed.

“Thanks,” he says slowly, tucking the case into its respective place on their music shelf. He immediately returns to the mess, Dallon helping to clean it up.

2.

“Hey, I liked that song!” Brendon cries indignantly as Dallon changes the station.

“Why? It’s so _ick_ I have no idea why it gets played so much.” He shudders, putting on his turn signal.

“It’s because it’s yellow,” Brendon says. “Well, not _all_ yellow. There’s green and blue, even some reds here and there. I like yellow, so I like the song.” He explains, pulling a leg up against the door. Dallon doesn’t say anything. Seriously, he doesn’t know what Brendon is on about. There aren’t any colors as far as he can tell. He thinks that maybe Brendon is just high, but he’s not. He’s completely sober.

“You still don’t see them do you?” Brendon asks softly.

“No, I don’t,” he places a hand over Brendon’s. “But the world must be a lot prettier through your eyes.”

3.

Brendon ordered Chinese and they sat, thigh-to-thigh, hip-to-hip with their backs against the couch. Dallon turned on _American Idol_ because it’s premiering tonight and it’s supposed to be good. It's become a sort of tradition for the two of them to have one night a week where they get takeout and watch a TV show. First it was _Friends,_ and then it was _Frasier_ but this week Brendon insisted on this new one.

Brendon hooks their pinkies together, then unhooks them. He opens and closes his mouth a few times, occasionally sneaking cautious side glances at him.

“Your name is blue,” Brendon says suddenly.

“What?” Dallon looks up from the takeout, eyes wide.

“Your name,” Brendon swallows. “It’s blue...to me.”

“Yeah?” Dallon sets down his box of lo mein, a smile tugging at his mouth. He “And what is yours?”

“It didn’t have one, really. Mostly it was just a shade of mint,” he stares wistfully into the tofu box and smiles a little. “But when you said it the first time, it turned this bright red.”

Dallon's heart drops, settling heavily in his stomach. Brendon turns his attention away from the television and back to Dallon. He can feel Brendon’s breath against his cheek and Dallon leans forward to kiss him.

“What was that for?” Brendon asks softly.

“Because,” he kisses him again, their lips moving languidly, easily. Brendon sighs, eyelashes fluttering against his cheek.

Dallon doesn't think he could love anyone else as much as he loves Brendon.  

4.

Brendon holds the bundle of sheet music tightly to his chest. He’s spent the past three months writing this and he’s not about to let any of it get away from him. He’s gone over it about a thousand times and finally feels strongly enough about it to hand it over to Dallon’s team for review. Dallon has no idea he’s submitting anything, either. He places the envelope on the desk of the producer’s assistant and turns on his heel to leave.

Brendon gets all the way to the stairs before he hears his name.

“Bren, what are you doing here?” Dallon presses a quick kiss to his lips.

“I just…” he glances over his shoulder to see the door of the office shut. “...came to see you.”

“Really? That’s sweet.” Dallon places a hand at his waist. “Did you need anything?” Brendon looks him in the eye and he can’t keep it from him any longer.

“Yeah, I mean I just turned in the music for Blakely-”

“You’re trying to get an album done? Why didn’t you tell me I could’ve helped a little,” he notices Brendon glance back at the door and tilts his head to redirect his focus. Brendon’s eyes flit back to Dallon’s.

“I...I wanted it to be all mine,” he whispers. “It’s jazz. Ryan…” he swallows. “There’s something I never told you about him.”

“Yeah?” Dallon rolled his shoulders back, trying to relax the rapidly tensing muscles in his back. As much as he didn't want to, Dallon remembers Ryan. He dated Brendon before. They were together for a few years and they broke up suddenly; Brendon moved out and never really trusted anyone again. It took him almost two years to say he loved Dallon and even longer for them to move in. Needless to say, Dallon _hated_ Ryan. He was sure it had something to do with the nightmares; so many sleepless nights for the both of them, where Dallon would have to coax him back to bed. On the worst nights could drive Brendon to throwing up, which was never a good experience for either of them.   

“He was in a band?” He says it more like a question, and the worry lines around his eyes alert Dallon to how seriously Brendon took whatever he was going to say. He nods.

“And?”

“And he had this song, _Cecelia’s Eyes_. The bridge didn’t sound right; the rest of the song was shades of chartreuse but the bridge was an odd kind of brown. So I told him so and he changed it, but it still wasn’t quite right. I ended up taking it and fixing it myself. He loved it and he got me to write the other parts of it, too: bass, guitar, drums, all of it. I was super excited to have my name on the CD because I wrote some of it and I was supposed to get some kind of credit for it. He gets it produced and I was with the band when he brought home copies of it. I took one and I flipped through the book to find the song but the only name next to it was his. He wrote in the summary something about how he loved the song. I asked him about it and he said I didn’t deserve it because he wrote the lyrics.” Brendon sighs and rubs a hand over his face. “I’m sorry, Dal I should’ve told you I don’t know why I can’t trust you, but I know you’d never do anything like that to me-”

“Hey, hey listen. It’s okay,” Dallon smiles, despite how angry Ryan can make him. “I understand it, I get it. I don’t blame you, it’s not your fault.” Brendon nods, pitching himself into Dallon’s chest.

Dallon can’t imagine what Brendon was like before that, if it had ever been easy for him to be intimate. But he decides to focus on how the world must feel to him, with the colors.

5.

Dallon sighs at his computer. It should be more easy for him to be able to articulate just what he wanted an answer for. Colored songs doesn’t sound right. Sound and color is too generic, distinctly _un-_ helpful _‘Why does sound have color?’_ feels right, so he Googles it.

 _‘Synesthesia: the Signs and Types’_ is the first result. The rest that follow have that same unfamiliar word. _Synesthesia._ It sounds like a disease, the type where your doctor comes in with the clipboard and the grave expression on his face _‘I’m so sorry but you have synesthesia.’_ He clicks on it anyway.

Synesthesia turns out to be something that is distinctly _not_ a disease. It’s more of a disorder. It means that the pathways in Brendon’s brain are crossed, so he sees colors when he hears music. He chews over his lip. Knowing this seems too strange, like he’s violating Brendon’s privacy in a way. He knows something about his boy that Brendon himself doesn’t know. He closes the tab and shuts off the laptop.

+1

“What are you doing?” Dallon sets a cup of tea by Brendon’s elbow, kissing the top of his head. He leans against the railing of the balcony, still in his pajamas. He hasn’t looked at the canvas Brendon is intently working on. Brendon’s tongue darts out to moisten his bottom lip and he pauses for a moment before saying anything. He sets his brush in the jar of turpentine and cracks his fingers. He adjusts the one earbud he has in.

“Trying to pin something down,” he says.

“How long have you been up?”

Brendon squints up at the sky, which has somehow turned a light shade of blue over the course of him sitting there.

“I woke up at midnight,” he rubs his eyes under his glasses. “Been up since.”

“It must be pretty important, then, huh?”

“Yeah.” Brendon takes up his paintbrush again and scoops a clump of paint from his palette.

“Well, I’ll let you get back to it.”

Dallon turns from the TV when he hears the sliding glass door close. Brendon is in his pajamas still, little smudges of paint all over him and his body. Brendon folds himself into Dallon’s side and curls his fingers into his shirt. Dallon wipes a tiny smear of baby blue from under his eye.

“Is it done?”

“Yeah,” he shifts a little and yawns. “Still needs to dry, though.”

“Are you tired?” Dallon threads his fingers through his hair, the way he does when they fall asleep chest-to-chest. Brendon nods. “You can sleep, you know.”

“Planning on it,” he says drowsily, his eyelids hanging heavy. He counts Dallon’s heartbeats in time with his breathing and he's dozing off before he's really aware of it.

Brendon wakes up sometime later, a blanket tucked around his shoulders. He stretches and holds the blanket around himself to go find Dallon.

The painting, to Dallon, looks like a supernova. It looks like chaos and colors and splatters of God knows what. But it’s beautiful. He loves it, partially because Brendon made it and partially because it’s so _good._

“Do you like it?” Dallon jumps, jerking his head up.

“Yeah, of course. But,” he pauses, cocking his head to the side. “What is it?” Brendon laughs a little.

“I thought you’d ask that. Anyway, it’s a song.”

Dallon stares blankly at Brendon for a minute, then at the painting, then back to Brendon.

“A...a song?”

“Yeah, that’s the way a song looks to me.”

“Which one?”

“It’s _Don’t Stop Me Now,_ you know...the Queen song?” Brendon squints a little, mostly because his glasses magically disappeared from his face.

“Yeah, I love that song. I think,” Dallon’s face softens. This is probably the most intimate thing Brendon could show him. This is the way music looks to him and no one else but Brendon and himself have ever seen it. Ever. And Brendon is letting him in enough to see it. “I think I get it.”

Brendon smiles.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”


End file.
